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Record-breaking atom laser to hunt quantum gravity

BEAM me up, Einstein. The world’s most powerful atom laser could one day be sent into space to probe the mysteries of general relativity.

Atom lasers emit beams of matter instead of photons. This is possible using an ultra-cold gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate, which makes millions of atoms behave like a single wave.

Previous work created atom lasers by bottling up the cold gas using powerful electromagnets, then guiding a beam of atoms out of the bottle using radio waves. But the radio waves used were relatively weak, limiting the laser’s power. Wolf von Klitzing at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser in Hellas, Greece, and his team found a way to use stronger radio waves, making an atom laser that is 16 times more powerful (arxiv.org/abs/1307.8282).

Von Klitzing hopes to use such a laser on STE-QUEST, a mission now under consideration at the European Space Agency. The mission’s spacecraft would look for fuzziness in the beam, which in orbit should only be caused by quantum gravity. That would provide a link between quantum mechanics and relativity.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Chilled-out laser may test relativity”